Book Review: Firevein: The Awakening (Firevein Saga Book 1) by Hanna Park

 

Firevein: The Awakening 
(Firevein Saga Book 1)
By Hanna Park

Publication Date: 14th April 2026

Publisher: Baisong Press 

Print Length: 246 Pages

Genre: Fantasy Romance 

I went to Røros for a wedding—not to fall for a man

who looked at me like he had already mourned me once.

From the first moment Rurik touched me, something beneath my skin burned. Every kiss felt inevitable. Every glance pressed at the edge of memory. He says I’ve lived before, that I’ve died before, that he has loved me through it all. I don’t remember him—but the mountain does.

The tunnels beneath Røros hum when I pass. Runes flare in the stone. The deeper I fall into his arms, the more something inside me begins to awaken—hot, wild, and impossible to ignore. I was never meant to survive what should have killed me. Now something ancient is stirring, and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s because I did.

I have buried Cristabel in every lifetime—though she has worn different names.

Across centuries, I have found her and lost her to the curse my bloodline was sworn to guard. She was never meant to live this time—but she did. Now the fire in her veins is awakening too soon. The balance beneath the mountain is shifting, and the oath I have carried for generations is beginning to fracture.

I waited lifetimes to hold her again. This time, I will not let her go—even if saving her means unleashing what should have remained buried.

A steamy Nordic fantasy romance of reincarnation, fate, and fire.

Triggers: Female cancer survivor. Steamy open-door scenes. 

My Thoughts

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I honestly went into Firevein: The Awakening expecting a fairly straightforward fantasy romance and ended up getting something much stranger and far more emotional than I anticipated.

The thing that worked best for me was probably Cristabel Johnson herself. She feels like someone trying very hard to keep herself cheerful even when she’s falling apart a bit underneath. She talks too much when she’s nervous, flirts constantly, makes jokes out of awkward situations — and at first it comes across as slightly chaotic more than anything else. But the more you learn about her, especially what she’s been through before arriving in Norway, the more sense all of that makes.

There’s a moment where it’s revealed that she went through cancer and was left by her boyfriend during it, and honestly that part got to me quite a lot. Especially because she’s still trying so hard to be warm and funny afterwards. It never turns her into a tragic character, though. If anything, it explains why she clings so tightly to joy and attention and feeling alive.

Then there’s Rurik, who from the very beginning feels less like a normal love interest and more like someone who has stepped out of a myth by accident. Their first meeting should feel ridiculous really — this enormous Viking-looking man appearing at the airport and immediately looking at her like she matters — but somehow the book makes it work. There’s this constant feeling that the two of them already know each other in some impossible way.

I also liked that the story doesn’t rush to explain everything immediately. For quite a long time you’re just sitting in the weirdness with Cristabel, trying to figure out whether things are genuinely supernatural or whether she’s simply overwhelmed by attraction, exhaustion, grief, and being somewhere unfamiliar.

The book definitely becomes very erotic quite quickly, though. Once the sauna scenes begin, the whole atmosphere changes and the relationship becomes incredibly intense. Normally I need a bit more build-up than that, but here it weirdly fit because the connection between them already feels larger than an ordinary attraction. The intimacy feels tied into memory and recognition rather than just physical chemistry.

The setting helped a lot with that atmosphere too. Everything about the snowy town, the old hotel, the forests, and the strange traditions gives the story this dreamy feeling where reality never feels completely stable. And I loved the gradual realisation that not everybody in this world is entirely human.

It’s not the sort of fantasy book that explains every rule or carefully lays everything out for the reader. A lot of it runs on emotion and instinct instead. But once I settled into that, I found myself completely pulled into it.

By the end, I cared far more about these characters than I expected to, and I’m genuinely curious to see where the story goes next.

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Hanna Park

I began my writing career in the pre-dawn of a winter morning while my husband snored like a train. We could call my husband the catalyst. If it weren’t for him, I would never have gone to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, feed the cat, and sit on the loveseat in front of the fire. It was there, in those moments of wondrous quiet, that I did something I had never thought possible. I opened my laptop, and while the coffee went cold, I wrote a story. My husband had no idea that these sojourns to the loveseat in front of the fire would become a daily occurrence, that writing would become an obsession, but the cat knew. She knows everything.

I write stories that make you laugh, make you cry, and make you love. Thank you, friends, for reading!

In the beginning, there was an empty page.

I am a writer who lives in Muskoka, Canada, with a husband who snores, a hungry cat, and an almost perfect canine––he’s an adorable little shit.

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